As more technology (e.g., video recorders, personal computers, Internet, TV web boxes, cell phones, etc.) enters peoples' lives, there is greater and greater demand for help in choosing devices and solutions and in setting them up and correcting problems. Even more generally, there is greater need for assistance in daily life, whether it is for medical, legal, family, or entertainment reasons.
At the same time that more information is required to conduct our lives, available effective sources of that information have not grown sufficiency in number or efficiency.
Companies selling products often have web pages or telephone support lines, but these are either too restricted in information, or the consumer must wait for long periods for live help.
To help with the routing of calls to available agents in a company, Cave (WO9813765) has devised a real-time system wherein a queuing manager routes calls to an agent who is free at the time. The system still involves automated answering systems which many consumers find frustrating, and it requires the hiring of not only agents but the queuing manager.
In the future, streaming audio and video capabilities on the web will make it possible for company agents to speak directly to consumers. However, this will be very costly to operate and the consumer will probably have to wait for long times to speak to one of the agents.
For general advice, the Internet is far too inefficient for many uses. Search engines return many hits, requiring the consumer to try many web sites and hope that the answer is available.
1-900 phone numbers (pay-per-call) are limited in scope and consumers hesitate to use them due to high per-minute rates, lack of trust in the billing, and generally perceived notions that the 900 numbers are for less-than-serious concerns such as astrology or sex chat. In addition, 900 services are small and narrowly focused, without the benefits of the Diverse Advice Sources arrangement, and they did not include matching and/or display technologies.
As shown in FIG. 1a, the fundamental problem with current advice technologies is that there are a large number of consumers and few agents to help them at each company; this is known as Centralized Advice Sources, and has the general shape of a funnel with too many questions going to too few agents. This leads to high cost (to pay agents and purchase systems), slow response time (long hold times on telephone), and lack of personal service (live agents). In addition, the agents often can only answer a limited range of questions regarding the companies' products. Thus, the participation and control of the consumer advice function by each company is fundamentally hurting the company by frustrating consumers and by requiring it to staff, manage, and pay for a vast and complex undertaking which is outside of its main expertise (making widgets, providing a narrow service, etc.).
Previous solutions have not adequately filled the need, particularly for immediate advice or connection between appropriate people.
The American Information Exchange (AMIX) was a central exchange that attempted to mediate between buyers and sellers of information. But the complexity and lack of immediacy, among other problems, limited its ability to efficiently solve the buyer's problem.
Walker (U.S. Pat. No. 5,862,223) envisioned a similarly complex exchange, often involving several lengthy steps where a user request is submitted; a search of experts, even beyond its members, is undertaken; a portion of the user request (question) is transmitted to the computer-selected expert, etc. until the request if fulfilled. Walker (col. 8, line 49; col. 24, line 67) allows the user himself to select the expert from a general list, but there is no provision for seeing which expert is available at that instant to talk, and there is no provision to make the process of connecting the expert and user quickly, say within 1 min or 10 seconds. In addition the user must submit a portion of his question (end user request).
In the complex process described by Walker, the expert and user can communicate in real-time (col. 9, line 1; col. 26, line 49), but only after the process of submitting the end user request to the expert.
In another embodiment of Walker (col. 28, line 66), the end user calls the central controller and eventually is put in touch with an expert for a real-time connection. No allowance is made for the central controller to make two separate calls (thus connecting the expert and user) after the user selects the expert.
In addition, there are no constraints in Walker on how fast the time-to-connect process needs to be to be useful. Timely information is more highly valued than delayed information.
Moreover, the detailed lists of experts and their characteristics (resumes, etc.) that are displayed in Walker (col. 25, line 35) are not suitable for a system that fills the need for rapid selection and connection between parties; as the number of experts grows, there will be simply too many pages of text to scroll through. There is needed a new display system where users can rapidly survey the available experts via information-rich graphics.
Walker does not take into account the use of experts as a workforce for customer support. No mention is made of product or service companies issuing certification for experts, and, in turn, those certifications listed or displayed explicitly by the central controller/server.
Telephone systems allow users to conduct real time two-way voice communication. Traditional land-line based telephone systems connect one telephone set to another through one or more switching centers, operated by one or more telephone companies, over a land-line based telephone network. Traditionally, a telephone connection is based on a circuit switched network.
Current telephone systems may also use a package switched network for a telephone connection. A package switched network is typical in a computer data environment. Recent developments in the field of Voice over IP (VoIP) allow the delivery of voice information using the Internet Protocol, in which voice information is packaged in a digital form in discrete packets rather than in the traditional circuit-committed protocols of the public switched telephone network (PSTN).
Cellular networks allow a cellular phone to connect to a nearby cellular base station through an air interface for wireless access to a telephone network. Recent developments in wireless telephone systems allow not only voice communications but also data communications. For example, cellular phones can now receive and send short messages through a Short Message Service (SMS). Web pages can now be retrieved through wireless cellular links and displayed on cellular phones. Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) has been developed to overcome the constraints of relatively slow and intermittent nature of wireless links to access information similar or identical to World Wide Web.